This chapter provides an overview of the purpose of the book, namely to help the user of public opinion data develop a systematic analytical approach for understanding, predicting, and engaging public opinion. This includes helping the reader understand how public opinion can be employed as a decision-making input, meaning a factor, or variable, to assess, predict, or influence an outcome. The chapter outlines how information from different disciplines, including cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, and political science, come together to inform the pollster’s work.

Anthony Seldon introduces the concept of the Effect series, the key questions and the fourteen wasted years accusation. This Effect book will be the eighth in the long line of academic and historical analyses dating back over fifty years of history to 1970 – and it builds on the conclusions and methodology of previous works in the series. One of these, The Coalition Effect (Cambridge, 2015), encompassed five of the years in question – allowing reflections to be made on the authors’ arguments in that volume, and for the impact to be judged in a longer time frame of government.

Breiner emphasizes Weimar’s role as an exemplar in political thought and focuses specifically on the highly influential political scientist Otto Kirchheimer. His chapter highlights how Kirchheimer viewed the Weimar Constitution as a struggle over conflicting and irreconcilable notions of democracy and society and further ties it to his postwar theory of political opposition and its decline. Breiner uses these discussions to highlight how mainstream American political science have misunderstood these ideas and how they relate to core aspects of the Weimar problematique.

Social psychology is interested in how social context influences individuals’ behavior, focuses on subjective variables, and takes the individual as its unit of analysis, which has important epistemological implications. It implies, inter alia, that questions that take a unit of analysis other than the individual (e.g., a movement, a group, a region, or a country) require other disciplines than social psychology. Hence, social psychology should fare well at explaining why individuals participate or fail to participate in a movement once it has emerged but is not helpful in explaining why social movements emerge or decline. Sociology and political science are better suited for such analyses. Although sociology and political sciences usually do their analyses at levels different than that of the individual, they do build their reasoning on assumptions about individual behavior. This is not to say that every social scientist must become a social psychologist, but it is to say that it is worth the effort to specify the social psychological assumptions that underlie the analyses and to see whether they fit into what social psychologists know about individual behavior. We delineate our disciplinary point of departure and build our model of Contextualized Contestation along the lines of Coleman’s boat.

Using a new visualisation technique for word embedding data, this chapter explores the formation of complex, compound concepts in the late eighteenth century, focusing specifically on ‘political revolution’. Word embedding models offer an alternative method of understanding relationships between terms, both as a function of proximity (as in collocation) and of shared contexts (as in synonyms). By measuring the direct distance within the embedding space between two words over time in a series of aligned models, we can witness two parts of a compound idea bind together and observe which terms provide the binding force between them. Using this method, I explore the way that ‘revolution’ travels across the eighteenth century in relation to the ‘political’. Although loosely linked in the wake of the Glorious Revolution at the outset of the century, revolution becomes heavily tied to Newtonian mechanics, before being pulled back into political usage during the French Revolution. The method I introduce here reveals the hidden connections to ‘science’ in both political and revolution that undergirds their eventual merger into the idea of ‘political revolution’ that we have inherited today.

Chapter 7 says that if scholars will pay more attention to political Stories, they still have to consider how to proceed. The marketplace for ideas is full of Stories, and the epistemological crisis is well funded in every direction. Therefore, Max Weber’s advice is entirely relevant: we must “choose” between Stories (or “causes,” in his term). And we must do that while critics like Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Paul Kahn, and Stephen Smith warn us that we should reject old-time Stories only if we can replace them with new ones that are equally effective.

This INTRODCTION shows how leaders (such as Vladimir Putin and Lyndon Johnson) often tell false stories about international affairs but lately have more and more disregarded truth (facts) in domestic policy talk while highlighting stories (like MAGA) instead. Yet truth telling is vital to democracy. Therefore, in post-truth America, political scientists should widen their disciplinary scope to pay more attention to stories than they do today. While doing so, they should (truthfully) criticize those stories within the guidelines of choosing, refraining, and dissembling (which will be explained more fully in later chapters).

Platform governance matters. The failure of platform companies to govern their users has led to disasters ranging from the unwitting culpability of Facebook in the 2017 genocide of the Rohingya people, to the spread of fraud and disinformation exacerbating the COVID-19 crisis, and to the subversion of free and fair elections across the world. The Introduction to The Networked Leviathan frames the problem of platform governance and its similarity to some of the problems confronted for centuries by political states and recommends that policymakers and scholars of the internet turn to older forms of political organization for inspiration.

We discuss how three social science disciplines, economics, sociology, and political science approach history and we contrast them to history as practiced by historians. We find that the drive to identify broadly generalizable causal effects, driven by the desire to predict and shape the future (the “Delphi syndrome”), frequently prompts social scientists to use history in a way that neglects the historians’ valuable insights. At the same time, the recent methodological developments in econometric techniques that have spread through the three disciplines place enormous, often unrealistic, historical demands on social scientists. We illustrate these issues by discussing several examples and we conclude by arguing that a way ahead consists in approaching the relation between idiographic and nomothetic research principles as one that approximates a continuum rather than a dichotomy.